The digging away of the ground, which originally sloped up to the Palace above the square, and the introduction in the 1930s of the present retaining wall with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier have diminished somewhat the effectiveness of the front of the Palace.
[58]. See Amodeo, A., ‘La Giovinezza di Pietro Nobile’, ‘La Maturità di Pietro Nobile’, L’Architettura, I (1955), 49-52; 378-84.
[59]. See Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, 1953.
[60]. See Hekker, H. C., ‘De Nederlandse Bouwkunst in het Begin van de Negentiende Eeuw’, Bulletin van de Kon. Ned. Oudh. Bond, IV (1951), 1-28.
CHAPTER 3 - Notes
[61]. The idea for the two-towered façade is probably derived from a project of 1809 by Lebas, but could also come from Gisors’s Saint-Vincent in Mâcon of 1810.
[62]. Three pieces only of the enamelled lava decoration were put in place; owing to the ensuing outcry they were soon removed.
[63]. Hittorff and other architects of his generation such as Henri Labrouste and Duban, who supported his proposal to revive the external polychromy they had noted on the Classical temples of Sicily, were closer in fact to Ingres than to Delacroix. Ingres in 1828 backed Labrouste’s controversial rendering of the Paestum temples showing external colour. Duban, one of the first to introduce polychrome decoration—the plaques of enamelled lava used in the entrance courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts are his—was a close friend and on occasion a collaborator of Ingres. Hittorff collected paintings by Ingres and assisted him with the architectural backgrounds of his pictures, though that in the ‘Stratonice’, which gives perhaps the best idea of the sort of polychromy intended by these architects, was supplied by Victor Baltard.
[64]. Actually the original paintwork on the beams and panels of the vestibules of the Gare du Nord is still there, but so dulled and begrimed that one hardly notices it. To the twentieth century the remarkable roof of Hittorff’s Rotonde des Panoramas in the Champs Élysées of 1836 would be, if extant, of more interest, since it was suspended from iron cables.